TELEVISION/RADIO; At the Disney Channel, It's A Diverse World After All

FOUR years after Kweisi Mfume, president of the N.A.A.C.P., branded television's lack of minority faces ''a shameful display,'' the networks have responded. Series like ''My Wife and Kids,'' ''The George Lopez Show'' and ''The Bernie Mac Show'' are entering their third or fourth seasons, and will be joined this fall by ''The Ortegas,'' ''Whoopi'' and others. UPN, which has aggressively targeted African-American audiences, has six sitcoms on its fall schedule with predominantly black casts.

But some of the most interesting and abundant television programming featuring minority casts can be found on a children's cable channel run by a company criticized in the past for racial insensitivity. The Disney Channel -- part of the same corporation whose 1946 film, ''Song of the South,'' was picketed by African-American groups and has not been released on home video in this country -- may have more minority characters in its entertainment programming than any other network or cable outlet.

Disney Channel's potential market is a ''big, diverse, interesting space,'' said Anne Sweeney, president of ABC Cable Networks Group and Disney Channel Worldwide. ''It's like what Walt Disney said 75 years ago about his company, 'Welcome to anyone that comes here.' ''

As for past missteps in Disney's animated films -- more recently, ''Aladdin'' (1992) was sharply criticized for its crude Arab villains -- Ms. Sweeney pleaded ignorance. ''All of that was before my time,'' she said. ''I wasn't given any mandate when I arrived here seven years ago. Everything we did from the get-go arose from the idea of thinking big about the world.''

For the most part, the Disney shows featuring minority characters don't fit into easy stereotypes. UPN sitcoms like ''The Parkers'' and ''Half and Half'' emphasize braying antagonists trading sassy insults. Disney's black characters are not averse to laugh-track zingers, but they carry themselves with considerably more dignity.

The animated series ''The Proud Family'' (weekdays, 4:30 p.m.), created by the African-American animator Bruce Smith, has a graphic panache and smart, snarky dialogue that more closely resemble the work found on Disney Channel's more successful rival Nickelodeon. The show's protagonist, Penny Proud, is a self-possessed 14-year-old trying to negotiate the passage from little girl to teenager with as much common sense and equanimity as she can muster. Penny is a good girl in the traditional sitcom sense -- this is Disney, after all -- but she also has an encyclopedic knowledge of black culture, high and low, and her hipster tastes are infectious. In one episode, Penny, a half-pint Nikki Giovanni, participates in a spoken-word contest, which prompts her best friends to take up poetry. Another show finds Penny and her clique learning karate after becoming enamored of a 70's blaxploitation film star, only to discover that he's really a no-talent hack.

Other Disney shows, both original and syndicated, can't match ''The Proud Family'' for smarts but also bust the minority TV template. ''Sister, Sister,'' which ran for six seasons on ABC and WB, portrayed a dysfunctional black family without resorting to finger-wagging sanctimony. The show, which is the third-highest-rated program on Disney Channel, centers on separated-at-birth twins (Tia and Tamera Mowry) who meet as teenagers and end up living together, along with their single, upwardly mobile adoptive parents (Jackée and Tim Reid). The situation is perilous at best, yet it never threatens to tear the characters apart. That might seem like a convenient evasion of reality, but given the negative portrayal of broken African-American families on shows like ''Six Feet Under'' (must every single-parent black household on TV be led by a crack-head?), it feels like a healthy antidote.

The most fearless cliché buster on the Disney schedule is ''The Famous Jett Jackson,'' currently stuck with an early-morning slot (3 a.m. weekdays) when little of its target audience is likely to be awake. That's a shame, because it handles family issues in a sensitive and realistic manner and judiciously balances ethics with coolness in a very un-Disney way. Like the clairvoyant teenager played by the former ''Cosby'' kid Raven-Symone on the Disney sitcom ''That's So Raven,'' Jett Jackson is a superhero of sorts: he plays an action hero named Silverstar on a popular television show. Unsatisfied with the trappings of stardom, Jett has the production moved to suburban North Carolina from Hollywood so that he can live a quiet life with his family.

Aside from the obvious novelty of a black teenager playing a TV superhero, ''The Famous Jett Jackson'' makes instructive drama out of the sentimental truism that family and friends trump fame and wealth. But Jett, a hip-hop-loving kid played with guileless charm by Lee Thompson Young, is never sitcom-bland, which makes his values that much more appealing.

''One could argue that Disney Channel is one of the better models of integration for TV today, especially among shows designed for younger children,'' said Robert Thompson, director of the Center for the Study of Popular Culture and Television at Syracuse University. ''But it's good business sense. Look at the history of American popular culture. 'The Cosby Show,' 'Roots,' Michael Jackson -- these are some of the most successful phenomena in the history of television. Here's a situation where a giant corporation is responding to the whims of the marketplace, and it's resulting in stuff that's in the public interest.''

With Jett Jackson and Penny Proud, Disney Channel has created appealing minority role models that don't feel as if they've been wrested from ''The Book of Virtues.'' For a company often thought to personify white-bread culture, that's a quiet triumph.